In his introduction to “The Age of Movies,” the Library of America anthology canonizing Pauline Kael, Sanford Schwartz writes that she was “undoubtedly the most fervently read American critic of any art” during her two-­decade tenure at The New Yorker. That’s not hyperbole. Such was the power of Kael’s voluminous writing about movies that she transformed the sensibility and standards of mainstream pop culture criticism in America — mostly for the better, despite her bullying personality (in print and in life), her sloppy professional ethics and her at times careerist escapades in self-dramatizing contrarianism. She had a lot to write about. Her prime years as a critic happily coincided with sequential renaissances in foreign cinema (the 1960s) and American movies (the 1970s). Week after week, she whipped up torrents of copy that could make causes célèbres out of even the most ephemeral Hollywood fluff. She upended journalistic criticism the way contemporaneous New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson revolutionized reportage. Her essays, fiercely present in the moment and epic in length, buttonholed readers so they’d feel as if they were sitting next to her in the dark, seeing every­thing she saw. She fired up her exultantly vernacular American prose as if she were writing high-octane fiction, not passing judgment on “Cabaret.”

It’s also true, as Schwartz writes, that Kael’s retirement, in 1991 at age 71, was a national news story. But her death, at 82 in 2001, was not. The culture of the new century was rapidly moving on. Now yet another decade has passed, and Kael may be little read outside of cineaste circles and film-studies academia (a milieu she detested). Most of her books are out of print. Ask moviegoers under 40 who she is, and you may draw a blank. Then again, what serious film critics of any era, including our own, are household names these days? We no longer live in the age of movies, and ambitious professional arts criticism is an increasingly arcane calling in a digital world where the old maxim, everyone’s a critic, is literally true. While much of Kael may be out of print, today it’s an anomaly when the output of any critic is collected in a book in the first place (let alone Kael’s 11 anthologies of full-length reviews). Few movies can muscle their way onto center stage in our reality-TV-saturated media universe. The individualistic filmmaking that sustained Kael and her peers now must fight to find financing or theatrical distribution outside New York. Even the once unassailable Oscars are suffering an identity crisis and struggling to hold on to their annual ­spotlight.

It’s hard to believe there was a time, not that long ago, when movie zealots would race to the newsstand on the days The New Yorker and The Village Voice were hot off the press to see Kael square off against her principal critical antagonist, the essential Andrew Sarris, on whatever was new in theaters that week. Though there are still some fine film critics at work, few readers wait for their verdicts on the new Almodóvar or Scor­sese the way so many once waited for Kael’s. Print movie critics declined in influence with the rise of Siskel and ­Ebert’s thumbs up-thumbs down appraisals on television. Now film criticism on television has largely vanished, too, succeeded by depersonalized aggregation sites like ­Rotten Tomatoes. The double-entendre book titles Kael chose to convey the orgiastic passions informing her criticism — “I Lost It at the Movies,” “Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” et al. — seem as distant and overheated as the title cards in silent melodramas. Today’s mass audience is more likely to watch movies (or, more often, time-shifted television) on a digital screen at home or on an iPad than in the sensuous dark of a movie house.

Some newcomers to Kael may not know what to make of “The Age of Movies.” Her style has been imitated by so many for so long that the excitement the ur-texts generated may not be instantly accessible. More than a few of the movies sparking her enthusiasm have faded into obscurity. (“The Last American Hero” is apparently M.I.A. even on Netflix.) So have some of the once-sacred cows she slaughtered, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up.” To appreciate Kael’s trailblazing, you have to see it in its broader context. Luckily, that backdrop is filled in with sure-footed sophistication by Brian Kellow in “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark,” a fair-minded and deeply reported Kael biography being published simultaneously with the artfully winnowed Library of America sampling of her work. The books should be read side by side.

Kellow is an editor at Opera News whose previous biographical subjects include the divas Eileen Farrell and Ethel Merman. They had nothing on Kael. A short, compact woman, she possessed a voluble personality — sometimes mother hen-ish, sometimes anything but — that could fill a room. “She’s like Willie Mays — you always know when she’s on the field,” the New York Times critic Vincent Canby said to me, with wry respect, as we emerged from a screening in the ’70s at which Kael’s exasperated sighs and not-so-sotto-voce wisecracks had been particularly distracting. There may never have been an American movie critic with a more voracious desire to work her will on the world — or with a more sui generis back story.

As told by Kellow, the protracted first act of the Kael saga would have made an ideal vehicle for Barbara Stanwyck or Bette Davis, stars who ranked high in her pantheon. It offers more than a few scenes worthy of “Stella Dallas” and “Of Human Bondage”: Kael, a hand-to-mouth single mother, spent decades in a professional and personal wilderness before landing her job at The New Yorker at the age of 48. Kellow also detects parallels between Kael and a later Hollywood star whose career she would champion, Barbra Streisand: “a smart Jewish girl who had refused to alter, even modify, her singular talent and her independent approach to life.”

Though Kael often made a shtick out of her Western roots — all the better to cast herself as a rebel in opposition to the East Coast intellectual establishment she resented — she was in fact a second-generation American of “Yentl”-ish heritage. Her parents had migrated from Poland to the slums of Hester Street and ultimately to the then pastoral town of Petaluma, ­Calif., where they joined a thriving community of Jewish chicken farmers. Kael, the youngest of five children, was born there in 1919. She adored her father, Isaac, a flagrant adulterer. “Rather than resenting her father for his infidelity to her mother,” Kellow writes, “Pauline seemed almost to take pride in it.” As an adult, she “would be drawn steadily to similarly unapologetic, confident and self-reliant males — as friends, sometimes as lovers and often as objects of professional admiration.” In that last category were the directors Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, James Toback and Brian De Palma.

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"Wasn't there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn't want to sing his head off?": Julie Andrews in "The Sound of Music."Credit
20th Century Fox

After Isaac Kael lost his farm in the economic turmoil of the late ’20s, he sought work in San Francisco, where Pauline would become a precocious high school student and an expert debater who in one competition, tantalizingly enough, faced Carol Channing. (Alas, the topic and the victor aren’t named.) After graduation, Kael entered Berkeley as a philosophy major and stepped up her prodigious consumption of literature. But she quit college before graduation, impatient to pursue a career as a writer of short fiction and plays. By then she was also pursuing serial attachments to men who had something other than confidence and self-reliance in common. They were all poets, and all gay or bisexual — Robert Duncan, Robert Horan and James Broughton.

Kael and Horan hitchhiked across America in 1941 to break into the Manhattan literary world. Broke and homeless upon arrival, they camped out in Grand Central Terminal. Horan wandered the streets in search of food, and one night caught the eye of the composers and lovers Samuel Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti when they spotted him weaving in front of Saks Fifth Avenue as they walked home from the opera. The couple unofficially adopted Horan, and, unsurprisingly, he peeled away from Kael. Thus began an odyssey, lasting more than a decade, in which she supported her writing habit with what she called “crummy jobs” — among them stints as a ­publishing-house grunt, a clerk at Brentano’s, a violin teacher and a freelance tutor. After some four years of defeat in her efforts to break into professional writing in New York, she returned to San Francisco. By the early ’50s, she was running a laundry and tailoring business off Market Street, desperate to support her young daughter, Gina, fathered out of wedlock by Broughton in 1948. She continued to crank out unpublished stories and unproduced plays in whatever spare time she could find. When she learned that Gina had a congenital heart defect, she could not afford the surgery needed to repair it.

Once Kael’s fortunes finally changed, it was through a lucky break as improbable as starlets being discovered at Schwab’s drugstore. Arguing with a friend about a film in a Berkeley coffeehouse in the fall of 1952, she was overheard by Peter D. Martin, the founder of a new film-criticism journal, City Lights. Martin was so captivated by Kael’s riff that he invited her to review Chaplin’s “Limelight” — which she did, in a pan revealing her critical voice in embryo. Mocking the film’s climax, in which the Chaplin hero, a has-been clown, dies in the wings of a theater after achieving redemption, Kael wrote that it was “surely the richest hunk of self-­gratification since Huck and Tom attended their own funeral.” The piece attracted the attention of Mary McCarthy, among others, and soon Kael was submitting articles about film to other small but prestigious outlets like Partisan Review and Sight and Sound. At the ripe age of 33, she had at last found her subject as a writer. She had also found a literary community, in an exploding Bay Area bohemia populated by the likes of Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Peter Martin’s partner in creating the legendary City Lights bookstore and the founder of its publishing-house spinoff.

What Kael did not find, however, was a way to make money. Her next big breaks, both in Berkeley, brought her a devoted local following, not income. In 1955, she was recruited by KPFA-FM to contribute film reviews — a million words’ worth in her accounting, all without pay, by the time she quit in anger in 1963. Her broadcasts caught the attention of Edward Landberg, the owner of the Berkeley Cinema Guild, a pioneering twin-screen art house. He and Kael became a couple, which led to Kael’s writing program notes for the films he booked, which in turn led to her commandeering almost all aspects of the theater, from the creation of inventive double bills (Clouzot’s “Diabolique” and Capra’s “Arsenic and Old Lace”) to the nuts and bolts of house management. Kellow writes that “locals grew accustomed to seeing her up on a ladder changing the Guild’s marquee, a hip flask filled with Wild Turkey dangling from a belt loop.” Along the way Landberg and Kael married. It didn’t last long — “I soon found out that I couldn’t stand this woman,” Landberg says — but Kael’s fleeting (and only) husband did pay for Gina’s heart surgery.

Kael’s national reputation began to grow with essays that staked out her idio­syncratic take on movies and that attacked the reigning film critics back east. Beginning with “Movies, the Desperate Art,” published in 1956 (and the kickoff entry in “The Age of Movies”), a coherent vision emerges. Kael deplored the empty mercantile dictates of Hollywood’s studio executives and their corporate masters. But she was equally contemptuous of the faddish, pretentious art-house crowd that “accepts lack of clarity as complexity, accepts clumsiness and confusion as ‘ambiguity’ and as style.” Much as her favorite films of her 1930s youth were screwball comedies and Warner Brothers gangster movies rather than the highfalutin prestige productions of Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg’s MGM, so she’d consistently prefer a low entertainment with a distinctive voice to a fashionable slab of deracinated chic like “Last Year at Marienbad” or a knee-jerk Hollywood message drama steeped in unearned righteousness. She valued emotional messiness over the technical mastery of a Hitchcock or Kubrick. “I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t admit having at some time in his life enjoyed trashy American movies,” she wrote in “Trash, Art and the Movies,” her landmark manifesto published in Har­per’s Magazine in 1969. But for all her dislike of New York’s literary elite (and, for that matter, the city itself), she was fully grounded in the Western canon and by no means provincial. She adored Jean Renoir and Satyajit Ray no less than Coppola and Spielberg. You could disagree with her judgments, as I did at least half the time, and still find her an invigorating, inspired and entertaining connector of culture’s dots whatever the bottom-line verdict on the film at hand.

Kael’s trajectory to The New Yorker included abortive runs at publications as disparate as The New Republic and the slick women’s magazine McCall’s, both of which tried and failed to tame her. ­McCall’s reportedly fired Kael for a retrospective attack on “The Sound of Music” that she shoehorned into a review of “The Singing Nun” in 1966. “Wasn’t there perhaps one little Von Trapp who didn’t want to sing his head off, or who screamed that he wouldn’t act out little glockenspiel routines for Papa’s party guests, or who got nervous and threw up if he had to get on a stage?” she wrote. By then, Kael was too much of a cult favorite to be slowed down by a pink slip. “I Lost It at the Movies,” a collection of her early work published in 1965 and propelled by a generous rave from Richard Schickel in The Times Book Review, had sold a remarkable 150,000 copies in paperback.

The piece that finally brought Kael east for keeps was a 7,000-word exegesis of “Bonnie and Clyde” that she wrote as an implicit tryout for The New Yorker in 1967. I still remember how liberating the essay felt when I read it as a college freshman. Kael not only wrote with a seductive, jazzy voice and an encyclopedic command of the arts high and low; she also situated the film’s groundbreaking use of violence in the simmering late-’60s America where it had landed. Despite antecedents like James Agee and Manny Farber (both Kael role models), this kind of criticism was almost unheard-of in a mass-­circulation publication then. The norm was instead exemplified by the most powerful movie reviewer of that time, Bos­ley Crowther, who had been The Times’s chief critic since 1940. He had dismissed “Bonnie and Clyde” as “a cheap piece of baldfaced slapstick comedy” that threatened the nation’s moral health.

Crowther had long been in Kael’s cross hairs, and with good reason. A witless writer who fell in line with most big-­budget packages the studios were flogging and was baffled by almost anything else, he exemplified moralistic middlebrow arts criticism at its most pernicious. Because of his position, he exercised a lot of clout in the marketplace besides. “Bonnie and Clyde” effected a revolution. Crowther’s tone-deaf pan, greeted with an uproar of protest from the paper’s readers, provoked The Times to replace him with an iconoclastic young critic, Renata Adler. Kael’s uninhibited rave persuaded the editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn, to move his film critic, Brendan Gill, to the theater beat, and divide the film job between Kael and the British writer Penelope Gilliatt, who would each serve six months a year in alternation (and often in bitter conflict).

At this triumphant juncture, a reader should turn to Kael’s full New Yorker reviews rather than Kellow’s year-after-year summaries of them. His narrative bogs down in recaps of movie plots and the juvenile jockeying that attended the annual awards balloting by the New York film critics’ organizations. Mercifully, this chronicle finally gives way to a dishy, if depressing, account of Kael’s decline. If her rise inspired many young writers to enter film criticism, her fall is a cautionary tale illustrating why critics in positions of power should get out while the getting is good, before they invariably flame out in corruption, self-parody, first-person megalomania or, in Kael’s case, all three.

A fierce skeptic of all dogmas (including religion, feminism and liberalism) who made her name in part by knocking Sarris for promoting the auteur theory, Kael didn’t recognize that she had morphed into a dogmatic auteurist in her own right — lauding her pet directors no matter what. Her hypocrisy didn’t end there. Where once she had derided Dwight Macdonald, then reviewing movies for Esquire, for likening Alain Resnais’s “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” to Joyce and Stravinsky, she now compared Altman’s “Nashville” to “Ulysses” and Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” to “Le Sacre du Printemps.” Her reviews started to swing between implausible overpraise and apocalyptic overkill to such an extent that she might have been describing herself when she dismissed Lina Wert­müller’s “Seven Beauties” as “all bravura highs and bravura lows, without any tonal variation.” Someone had to cry foul, and that provocative someone turned out to be Renata Adler, who, writing in The New York Review of Books in 1980, declared Kael’s work “piece by piece, line by line, and without interruption, worthless.”

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Kael’s ethical breaches were more problematic than the coarsening of her writing. Though scrupulous about refusing to accept gifts or meals from movie people — a no-brainer, surely — she sought out and befriended those she admired without disclosing these often intense personal relationships in her (usually favorable) reviews of their films. This incestuousness would lead her to Hollywood for a brief, humiliating tenure as a Paramount functionary under Warren Beatty’s sponsorship in 1979. Though she returned to The New Yorker after that failure, her authority as a writer and critic was diminished. The falloff was compounded by the falloff in movies. In the judgment of her friend James Toback, Kael was slow to recognize the metastasis of Hollywood’s blockbuster mentality after the success of “Jaws.” From now on, as Toback puts it, movies were “going to be made for 12-year-old boys,” with only “a sliver of money spent, relatively speaking, on the rest of us.”

The most serious brief against Kael’s professionalism, however, is Kellow’s discovery that she ripped off the research of a U.C.L.A. academic, Howard Suber, for “Raising Kane,” her lengthy 1971 essay about the making of “Citizen Kane.” Adding to that infraction, her piece contained many factual errors of her own, all undetected by New Yorker fact checkers and all contrived to reinforce her anti-auteurist argument that the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, not Orson Welles, was the movie’s principal author. “Raising Kane” was omitted from the Library of America volume for reasons of space, according to Schwartz’s introduction, but Kellow’s account suggests it should have been eliminated in any event for its ­improprieties.

In keeping with the titles of Kael’s books, Kellow’s subtitle, “A Life in the Dark,” has its own double meaning. Kael’s personal life was often benighted. Her overbearing relationship with her daughter — whom she home-schooled as a child and kept on a tight leash as secretary, driver and companion well into adulthood — has a chilling vibe. Nearly as dispiriting is Kael’s badgering and baiting of the genial, strait-laced Shawn, who indulged her with more space and literary latitude than perhaps any critic has ever enjoyed in a major American periodical (though he refused to be strong-armed into letting her write about “Deep Throat”). Kellow also delves into Kael’s sometimes fraught dealings with her fawning retinue of young critical acolytes, the so-called Paulettes, some of whom she disappointed, stunted or betrayed — if they didn’t betray her first.

In Kellow’s acknowledgments, he reports that virtually the only major figure in Kael’s life who declined to talk with him was her daughter, Gina James. But he does quote from what he rightly calls her “remarkably brave and unsentimental” eulogy at her mother’s 2001 memorial tribute at Lincoln Center. It was Kael’s “lack of introspection, self-awareness, restraint or hesitation” that gave her “supreme freedom to speak up, to speak her mind, to find her honest voice,” James said. “She turned her lack of self-awareness into a triumph.”

It’s clear that Pauline Kael lost much more than she ever knew at the movies. But her daughter is right. It was precisely that obsessive, even self-destructive personal investment that makes her work, both at its extraordinary best and at its most egregious, unlike anything else in the modern history of cultural criticism. If you want to understand what it was like to be in the audience during America’s thrilling, now vanished age of movies, you must begin with Kael.

PAULINE KAEL

A Life in the Dark

By Brian Kellow

417 pp. Viking. $27.95.

THE AGE OF MOVIES

Selected Writings of Pauline Kael

Edited by Sanford Schwartz

828 pp. The Library of America. $40.

Correction: October 28, 2011

An earlier version of one of the bibliographical notes with this article listed the price, publisher and other details about “The Age of Movies” incorrectly. (The erroneous information pertained to another book discussed in this section, “Which Side Are You On?”)

Correction: November 27, 2011

A review on Oct. 30 about “Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark,” by Brian Kellow, and “The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael,” edited by Sanford Schwartz, erroneously attributed a distinction to the Berkeley, Calif., radio station KPFA, which in 1955 recruited Kael to contribute film reviews. KPFA, which went on the air in 1949, was not “the first listener-supported radio station in America.” (One earlier station that relied for a time on listener contributions was little WEVD in New York, which began broadcasting in 1927 as a Socialist station.)

A version of this review appears in print on October 30, 2011, on Page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Roaring at the Screen. Today's Paper|Subscribe